The Post Cold War World by Michael Cox

Author:Michael Cox [Cox, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Asia, China, Military, Persian Gulf War (1991), Iraq War (2003-2011), Russia & the Former Soviet Union, United States, 20th Century, World, Modern, 21st Century
ISBN: 9781351140942
Google: AXx_DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-12-14T02:59:15+00:00

Après l'empire, le déluge

‘George Bush did almost everything diplomatically possible to keep the Soviet Union alive.’42

The withdrawal of Soviet power from Europe and German unification could not but have consequences back in the USSR.43 Indeed, one of the many charges laid against Gorbachev by his critics then, and much later, was that he had in effect betrayed the Soviet people by simply abandoning everything the USSR had sacrificed so much for in its great war of liberation against the Nazi enemy between 1941 and 1945. Some were even so suspicious of the Americans and NATO that they even began to wonder aloud about Gorbachev’s loyalty to the USSR itself. But as one of his key aides noted at the time, what was really undermining Gorbachev was less the loss of the USSR’s ‘cordon sanitaire’ to the West – though this hardly helped his cause – and more the economic and political situation at home.44 By late 1990 the position had become critical; and a few months on into the spring of 1991, it had become nearly impossible. As the situation continued to deteriorate, it gradually began to dawn on policymakers in the West that the Union itself might not hold together.45

The possibility that the USSR might in fact break up was one that caused significant consternation, not to mention intense debate, within the western intelligence community. Two positions began to take shape. One held that there was nothing in the end that could be done to prevent the USSR from falling apart, and that there might even be significant strategic benefits for the West and the US if it were to do so. But there was another equally, if not more influential, viewpoint. This maintained that not only would the USSR hold together, it also assumed that its disintegration was not necessarily in anybody’s interest, including that of the United States.46 Indeed, the consequences of this particular empire falling apart could be potentially catastrophic, for not only would it unleash all sorts of possible dangers ranging from nuclear proliferation to outbreaks of irredentist wars, it would also make economic reform that much more difficult.

These fears were heightened in the minds of many western policymakers by the tragedy then beginning to unfold in Yugoslavia. Here, the end of the Cold War announced itself not as liberation but as ethnic cleansing and bloody war. Many then drew the not unreasonable conclusion that if this could happen to a small, non-nuclear state which had been relatively tolerant and open for many years, what kind of Pandora’s Box would be opened up if the USSR – which had rarely been open, never been especially tolerant and did possess nuclear weapons – went the same way? Gorbachev used precisely this argument with Bush, Scowcroft and Robert Gates at a private meeting held in Russia in July 1991. What was happening in former Yugoslavia he warned could very easily happen in the USSR, but with two very important differences. It would be on a much greater

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